


The Light of Day

by TheNeonFennec



Category: Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:42:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22041262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNeonFennec/pseuds/TheNeonFennec
Summary: Test Subject 18 might have evaded a fiery demise at the hands of Nigel, but she isn't out of the woods yet. She now must find her allies within the mechanical deathtrap of Aperture Laboratories and make her way to the surface, all without attracting the attention of Her.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 29





	1. Out of the frying pan...

“No way. No freakin’ way!”  
The girl ran forward into the room, looking about frantically in the dark. This had to be some sort of joke, right? Even if she wasn’t outside yet, there was an elevator or something somewhere.  
Right?  
Her heart pounded in her chest and in her ears, and she couldn’t stop herself from breathing heavily. Adrenaline was still flowing freely after the whole ‘Finding out you’re going to be killed in a fire’ thing. Cautiously, she made her way to the edge of the room and felt the walls with shaking hands. She searched for a handle, a door frame, _anything_ , but she only met the rough, almost canvas like texture of painted panels. As she balled her hands into fists, about to punch the wall beside her (which, though she understood as being unproductive, was a somewhat cathartic way to vent her frustrations), an idea struck.

  
“Is this still part of the test?” With her voice still hoarse from suspension, she yelled up towards the ceiling. “Nigel? What’s the test you—you piece of scrap?!” Maybe not the most inventive of insults, but she wasn’t really in the right headspace for creative writing. But her calls met no answer. No orange light in the dark. No cocky voice crackling over the intercoms. Nothing. She sighed.   
And then, her hand hit something. It was small, just a place along the seam in the wall where she could feel, just _barely_ , that one panel was pushed in farther than the other. Slightly uneven too, as if it was broken. The test subject took the opportunity and shoved her paint gun into the jacket tied around her waist, then leaned against the wall with her palms flat on it. With all her might, she pushed. The fake grass beneath her was torn up as her long fall boots dug into it, creating grooves that exposed flooring, rather than mud. It took a few seconds. But eventually, the panel budged. Just a little at first, enough to break the confines of her false freedom and let some light trickle in. She saw this, and laughed triumphantly. Then the panel gave the rest of the way in a split second and sent the test subject falling onto a cold metal walkway, her paint gun digging painfully into her side. She lay there a moment. Then, she stuck a fist into the air.   
“Success.”

She didn't like the silence. Throughout her time testing with Nigel, he was always putting on music, shuffling around tracks and taking pride in creating the right testing atmosphere. Now, it was silent. Well, she considered, not really silent. In the background, there's the hum. The deep, electric hum of hundreds of machines, all around. You can forget it for awhile, but it's always there. Without music to distract her now, as she crept down a rickety catwalk, that hum was almost unbearable. It seemed to fill her ears like cotton. The only thing worse than it was the clank of her shoes against the metal, almost painfully sharp in comparison. Still, she crept on, trying to make herself as unnoticeable as possible on the exposed walkway. 

She wasn't certain what she was hiding from, really. Nigel hasn't shown himself for a good twenty minutes now, and she didn't think anyone was really around except for him.

Wait, what's up with that?

As she stumbled to a door, trying the handle and finding it unlocked, the test subject realized she remembered very little of what Aperture was supposed to be like. Everything leading up to her suspension was a foggy mess, voices and faces warped like through water. Was that supposed to happen? She’d been too busy trying to survive, completing each new task set in front of her, one after another. She hadn’t stopped to think.

She stopped now. Leaning against a wall and closing her eyes, taking deep breaths. Calm. The test subject tried to recall what exactly led her to this point in her life.

Nothing. Nada. Zip. 

That was disconcerting. 

That was something to be dealt with later, she decided. Something to tell a scientist about when she was safe and away from that robot. But, once she opened her eyes to properly survey the room she’d ducked into, those thoughts began to fade. The room was lit better than outside, but was far from bright. The fluorescent lights above her flickered, revealing rows of abandoned desks. Paperwork was scattered about, untouched for god knows how long. The computer screens were grey instead of black, coated in unfathomable amounts of dust. It was absolutely devoid of people. It was very clear at this point that Nigel wasn’t the only thing gone awry in the facility.

“Hello?” She croaked out. Only her own echoing voice answered. Aching for answers—and all over, in general—She sat herself down at one of the computers. She pressed the button on the tower, then tried to wipe some of the dust from the screen. In the moment, she had forgotten about the gels still covering her hands. It resulted in a blue and green screen rather than a clean one, and her already sticky hand getting dirtier. She sighed, wiped her hand on her apron, and moved a computer to the left. Instead of her hand, she used a discarded print out to clean the screen of this one. This one chugged to life slowly. 

When it booted up, she was met with a pop up message. It read,

ALERT: FACILITY ON LOCKDOWN.  
  
Yet another bad sign. The computer wouldn’t let her click off or close the notification, so she got up and moved on...   
...To the floor. She moved on to the floor, where she lay face down in the dust. Everything seemed to be working against her, denying her help, and she was _exhausted._ So, despite her horrible position, she decided to rest. No one was coming at her now, right? No one was trying to kill her. And as far as she knew, this room couldn’t open up and toss her into a pit of fire. The test subject came to the decision that she wasn’t going to get anywhere without a moment of sleep. Just a nap. Maybe, just maybe, someone would come by and help her while she was out. Someone who would wake her up and tell her that there had been a mistake, and everything was alright, and despite every red flag she’d ran into she would be able to go home.

Wherever home was. 

Just five minutes, she thought. Five minutes and then she could deal with everything.

Unbeknownst to the test subject, someone else was sleeping just one level above her. He had been asleep for quite a while, and was about to have a very bad time upon waking up.


	2. Opening the Box

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The test subject finds an exit ticket.

She did not wake up feeling better. It’s hard to feel “better” than anything when you have to haul yourself off the office floor, spitting dust out of your mouth. Especially when your hopes of being found are crushed by a quick look around. No, the test subject decided as she sat up that things were still Bad and she was still very much in Trouble. A quick self assessment also told her that she was nearly starving, which was just dandy. Even if she could find a vending machine or something, how could she tell if what was in it was expired? She had no clue what the date was. 

Then, she eyed the paint gun on the ground next to her. Looking at those two glass chambers of gel, thoughts of orange and blue-raspberry crept into her mind. 

"What if..." she said quietly, picking up the gun. It clicked when she pressed the trigger, disabled at some point by one of those energy fields she'd been corraled through. Desperate yet determined, the test subject turned the gun over, looking for some seam or switch. Sure enough, on the base of the handle, a little hatch opened as soon as she pried at it with her nails. There, tucked away, was a little button labeled 'power'. She pressed it twice. Off and on again. Worth a shot, right?

She lifted the supposedly reset gun with caution, aiming for the wall a few meters away. She pressed one of the triggers and sure enough, blue gel shot out, splattering against the wall. She grinned. Another success!

But the experiment wasn't over yet. Gently, she pressed down the blue trigger for a fraction of a second. Just long enough to fill her cupped hand with the gel. She brought it to eye level, jiggling the substance back and forth a bit. She had absolutely no clue what it was made of, and was certain that it wasn't in any way food. Yet, what's the harm in trying?

The test subject gave the gel a lick. Then, she very quickly spat it out and let the rest of the handful splash onto the floor. 

"Eugh! Tastes like— like freakin' dish cleaner!" She burst out into a coughing fit, partly due to the horrible taste, partly due to the fact that her talking felt like running a cheese grater across her vocal cords. She also, in that moment, didn’t want to think about how she knew what dish cleaner tasted like. Instead, she wiped her now blue hand across her orange pants, lifting herself off the floor. Wherever she was, it was evident no one was going to come and find her. This left her with only one undesirable option: adventuring out into Aperture, a place full of asshole cores and fire traps and turrets. A shiver went down her spine at the thought of that death trap. 

The door at the opposite end of the office opened reluctantly, hinges creaking after years without use. The hallway refused to light up as the office had, leaving her grasping at the wall to her left for support. Ahead of her, the corridor branched off to both the left and right before ending at a rickety stairwell.  _ That  _ was quite a surprise to her, as the landing was broken and sloping downward. Where the stairs leading down should have been was only a seemingly endless abyss. Her fate chosen for her time itself, she headed upward on the remaining stairs one level, when something new caught her eye. 

A light. It flickered under a doorway, casting another otherwise dark hallway in a faint, unsteady grey light. The door was left just slightly ajar, as if someone had rushed in and neglected to shut it fully behind them. Then, as she scanned the door with a carefulness only found in those who have found themselves in mortal peril, she caught a detail so small it nearly escaped even her. Reddish smudges on the door knob. It wasn’t accompanied by the rough texture of rust, she realized as she touched it. No, it was something on top of the metal. It was on the floor too, in places not covered by debris. She wanted to think it was red paint.   
  
That hope didn’t last very long.

Inside the room was—like everything else—a mess. For starters, it seemed she had entered the beginning of a testing track via some sort of staff entrance. In the center of the room was a glass cube, and inside that, some sort of covered bed. The glass walls were only barely there, having turned into a scattering of glittery shards on the floor long ago. Inside the glass "room," A companion cube lay amongst scattered papers from a Manila folder. Off to one side, 18 could just barely make out through the moss and grime the contents of the bed-like pod.

A person. A real, proper, human person. A scientist even, maybe. He looked a mess, though. Black hair and beard unkempt, clothes dirty and disheveled. As she crept closer, she could see more red spots on the inside of the stasis pod.

Stasis pod. That's what it was, right? Just on the edge of her mind, she thought she could recollect being lectured about these sorts of things. But, that didn't really matter. What mattered was that she wasn't alone. She had found her help.

Now, how to wake him up?

\---

“I’m telling you Virgil, this project is  _ cursed. _ ”

Virgil, the maroon-ish core currently working on the chattier one, simply rolled his eye. “And why is that?” he asked, his voice carrying a distinctive Norweigian lilt, despite having never been to said country. As he listened to the other core go off he pulled up a complete diagnostic on the monitor in front of him.

“Well,” began the core plugged into the wall, “Five minutes after I finished setting up my testing track, the entire facility went dark. I wasn’t able to wake my first subject before  _ She _ died and took all the stasis pods with her! Thankfully my subjects were kept alive through some reserve power, thank  _ god,  _ but I was locked out of the system. The whole thing was too timely and out of nowhere to be a coincidence. Cursed.”

“Okay,” Virgil commented, only paying half attention as he sorted through his patient’s code. “But I wouldn’t call the eventual take-down of a killer AI ‘out of nowhere’, but go on, Nigel” He tried to fill time as he started moving around his work area on his rail, looking for some instrument. It shouldn’t have been hard to find, actually. The maintenance wing was kept quite tidy, clean white walls and floors, all works in progress kept nicely to one side of the room. The Maintenance Core didn’t tend to pile his tools or leave junk about, which explained some of his frustration upon finding something missing. 

Nigel took the invitation to talk more. “So, yeah. Years pass, yadda yadda, and I  _ finally  _ get back to testing a few days ago. Things are going well, great actually, until I get to the end. I’m following protocol, getting ready to dispose of this test subject, and then I find out  _ she  _ saw it coming! She closed up the fire pit, and demonstrated a level of tenacity that according to  _ Her  _ new rules, meant I had to let her go. But then, no one after her has been any good! Anyway, this is just a long way of saying I’ve suddenly run out of subjects, and now I’m stuck with only one set of weird skewed data.”

Virgil stopped in his tracks, just looking at Nigel. All thoughts of his missing tool were forgotten. “I’m sorry,” he said, “rewind a bit. You let a test subject go?”

“Well, sorta,” Nigel said, looking sheepish. “I don’t actually have access to any surface elevators, so… I just let her loose in one of our fake outdoors-y rooms. Figured that was close enough.”

Virgil still just stared. “You  _ what? _ ”

\---

“Okay,” she said to no one, “okay, here we go. This is getting somewhere.” With one hand, the test subject tried to clear the grime accumulated on the pod’s control panels. Even with the top layer of dirt or dust or whatever cleared off, it seemed the buttons were way too weathered to be of any use. Every single button was stuck. Frantic once again, she looked about the room for a plan B. She had decided that this mystery-pod-dude was her ticket to safety, and she wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of her retrieving him. 

Finally, something caught her eye. Among the piles of broken glass and wilted greenery, there was a distinctly shaped metal object, long and bent slightly at each end: a crowbar! She rushed over to pick it up, taking just a moment to feel its weight in her hand. Then, she raised the crowbar far above her head, ready to swing down, and—

“Wait, no, bad idea. I don’t want broken glass to hurt this dude.”

She lowered the bar, instead angling its curve into the seam between the glass dome and the stasis pod’s base. Once she’d found the edge, she pushed down on the other end as hard as she could, nearly lifting herself off the floor in the process. With a satisfying pop, the seal was broken and the glass slid away automatically. A hiss followed as the chemically laden air that once filled the pod escaped, flowing onto the ground like dry ice fog. Finally, she could see the man clearly. She leaned over, examining his features, trying to gauge if he was actually  _ alive  _ or not, when he suddenly sat up.

“AAGH!” She screamed. 

  
“AAH!” He screamed as well, in response. A second later though, they were quiet, just staring at each other in the moments after the scare. She noticed the now-awake man had heterochromia. 

“Hello,” he said, obviously wary and slightly. He cleared his throat before continuing almost, “I’m Doug… Doug Rattmann”

“Hey,” the test subject responded with a laugh, “I’d tell you my name, if I could remember it.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for my inactivity. I do mean to post more, but please enjoy what's here and let me know what you think!


End file.
